Schreiber High School students Joseph Jailer-Coley, Andrew Pariser and Jarryd Levine have been named semifinalists in the annual Siemens Westinghouse Competition in science, mathematics and technology.

The students, all in the school's science research program, headed by teacher Dr. Fritz Cayetmitte, are among 288 semifinalists - out of 2,000 students nationwide - to be honored by judges in the prestigious competition, which is conducted on university campuses, including MIT in Cambridge, MA.

Jailer-Coley and Pariser worked together on their project, "Integrated Intelligence Applied to a Search Mission using Multiple Autonomous Robots," which presented a step-by-step procedure to organize teams of robots in search of an objective.

Levine's work, "Identifying Bacterial Genes via Neural Networks," created a method that can separate coding and non-coding regions of bacterial DNA. The research, says Levine, can lead to an understanding of the characteristics that separate these two types of DNA regions.

In honor of their accomplishments, the students were awarded Certificates of Excellence by the Port Washington Board of Education this month.